Friends,
I just had an email exchange with some members of the Participatory
Culture Foundation's team building the Democracy Media Player.
(www.getdemocracy.com)
I had the idea that, as well as distributing videos, they could
distribute and manage FOSS software applications from within the
player. Two of their people wrote me back to say they liked the idea a
lot!
Tiffiniy wrote: "I really love this idea... would you be working on
this? It would be easy to set up a Broadcast Machine installation on a
webiste dedicated to OS distribution with appropriate text and pitch.
Then, there will be a feed/channel that people can subscribe to and use
to download the latest OS app....
Let me know if you're interested in setting something like this up. We
can also put a call up for someone to do something like this."
Nick also replied, "It would be easy to make a feed of install files
and modify the
Democracy front end to allow execution of those files. However, typical
packaging systems do much more than this. They deal with versioning and
library dependencies and cryptographically verify packages. This is how
they avoid the "DLL hell" you typically get on a Windows system. To do
this right, you'd want to port an existing packaging system, probably
apt, to Windows, then add a Democracy "feed" parser that used an apt
repository instead of RSS. To get any sort of corporate acceptance,
you'd also probably want to somehow make the system work with the
Microsoft Installer, so it could be used to distribute software from a
Windows Server out to clients. (I don't know much about this last part.)
On the other hand, given the sad state of Windows software and the lack
a packaging system, you might be able to make something useful to most
Windows users with a few creative hacks."
To me, I think the simplest thing that would work should be the first
goal. This later, more sophisticated idea could come after the first
proof of concept is successful.
Is anyone interested in helping to recruit programmers?
Thanks,
Ben
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